Sunday, August 06, 2017

Keep your electric eye on me babe

I saw the movie Detroit last night. I squirmed. The beatings.
The murders. I looked up the Algiers
Motel incident when I came home. I squirmed some more.

And then I decided to look around in the NYT and see what
was being reported around the time Detroit was experiencing its revolution and
reaction.

In the summer of 1967, there was a riot in Newark, a riot in
Syracuse, a riot in Tokyo, a riot in Cambridge Maryland, student riots in
Brazil, a riot in Cincinnati, a riot in Manchuria, a riot in Clearwater
Florida, a riot in Nashville, a riot in Houston, a riot in the Roxbury section
of Boston, etc. In Philadelphia, the Mayor, riding the white rage wave, accused
a group of “revolutionary” negroes of planning a mass poisoning of whites.
Arlen Spector, then Philadelphia’s D.A., held a news conference to announce the
charges.

The NYT times helpfully labeled these Negro Riots. As in the
headline: “Milwaukee Calm after Negro Riot.” Whites, apparently, only responded
to the riot. When the police beat peeps in the street, that wasn’t rioting, but
anti-rioting. In this way, a riot is unlike a dance, in which both partners are
described as dancing.

1967 was an interesting year in the racial geography of the
U.S. Small news stories indicate larger phenomena. Take Cheshire Connecticut.
Cheshire was an upscale suburb north of New Haven. One of its selectmen, name
of William E.Kennedy, Jr., thought it would be a good idea to officially pass a
resolution welcoming Negro homeowners. This roused the town from its dogmatic
slumbers, apparently, and the select board found itself confronted by angy –
but non-rioting – affluent suburbanites who, in the words of one of them, didn’t
want to be “forced to welcome anyone.” Anyone is a nice disguise. It is used
today whenever black lives matter is mentioned. Don’t all lives matter? The
suburbanite from Cheshire would recognize the world of Trump’s America as her
own. In the event, Kennedy’s resolution was altered to a welcome to anyone.

I’m not a fan of all the sixties shit, but I am astonished
at how unsettled things were in America, how rapidly things moved. The period
from 1945 to around 1980 featuring an explosion of civil rights activity, as
well as an anti-colonialist revolution, of which the Detroit riot was a part.

The rupture created in this period was re-interpreted, and
the liberatory impulses lost, in the neoliberal era, which extends from the 80s
until now.

Neo-liberalism, too, was initiated in a call to arms against
the state – a call to arms for the wealthy. In the mix, national governments are supposedly undermined
– which I take to be a surface phenomenon of a more profound shift to wealth
inequality. The call for shrinking the gov is easily reversed, as it was in
2008-9, when the fortunes of the top of the wealth scale are threatened. In the
Anglo countries, unsurprisingly, great inequality went hand in hand with mass
incarceration, and an astonishing absolute loss in the assets held by
communities that were gaining power in the 45-80 period. Here I guess the
African-American experience is exemplary. Now I wouldn’t want to say that this
pushback effected all marginalised groups. Groups that are represented in the
wealthiest class due, simply, to the way that class is composed of human beings
– white women and white gays – have benefited from the end effects of previous
civil rights movements. This is to the good. My feeling, though, is that the
choice to mobilize the productive sectors of the nations with more developed
economies in a great global game of musical chairs identified the gains made by
these two groups with “globalisation” – instead of the liberation movements of
the epoch before – and this price has been onerous and increasing. This is the
hocus pocus that gives us an image of the racist white working class while the
racism is all led by the white wealthy, an upper class that, in the U.S. for
instance, is 96 percent white. A
liberatory globalisation movement still has not arisen. When it does – when a
general strike in China, say, is mirrored by one in the US – then I would say
globalisation has turned, as it was turning in the sixties. We live in the
pause. The old globalization was one of urban guerillas, condemned by NYT
editorial and FBI director alike.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.